


Invaluable

by virtueofvice



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-17
Updated: 2015-02-17
Packaged: 2018-03-13 09:29:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3376475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/virtueofvice/pseuds/virtueofvice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wesley has all the time in the world to look back on what he has lost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Invaluable

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mossomness](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mossomness/gifts).



He remembered when he'd thought to replace her, the girl with the soft brown eyes and guileless smile. _"Leave them on…"_ Lilah had given him what he thought he wanted, what she thought would be enough. But it was a cheap and tawdry excuse, the scent of her, her weight in his lap - shorter limbs, fuller breasts, coarser skin. A handsome woman still, but without the innocence he craved. Had he known then what he discovered later, how much it would cost him to lose _her_ … He would never have tried to buy illusion so cheaply. Especially since Lilah herself did not come cheap. 

_Fred._ He saw her face in the glow of firelight, oblivious to its source. A single brilliant light, narrowing the whole wealth of his experience down to a pinprick, leaving her the golden focus of his idolatry. With a gawky grace and a smile that could make a man lose his head, if he were the right kind of man - or the wrong one.

Gunfire. Her eyes wide in horror, despair. The acid taste of bile and blood in his mouth. _"He pointed a gun at you, Fred. So I shot him."_

His own sentiments, echoing back to him. _"That was a signal. Is that… clear enough for you?"_

He learned her worth. Invaluable. 

_"Please, Wesley… Why can't I stay?"_

She left him, his brilliant light. In her absence, the storm rolled in, and it was as if the night swallowed them all. She was gone, and in her place there was nothing but blood, and ice, and pain. Nightmares. Sorrow. Futility. 

_"Would you like me to lie to you now?"_

He let it happen. Was there ever another choice?

Death was his business. He was surrounded in death, steeped in it, comrade in arms with the dead. Sometimes he felt as if the world were made of death. But no one had ever said dying would be so much like coming home.

_"It's gonna be okay. It won't hurt much longer, and then you'll be where I am. We'll be together."_

But Wolfram & Hart had their claws in him, and the Devil would have his due. 

Some contracts are eternal. And in the end he was glad to come back, because in the end there was nothing. Just black emptiness. She wasn't there waiting for him. Perhaps it was as Illyria had said, and she wasn't anywhere. But if there were a heaven and a hell, he had always known that Fred was destined for the one, and he the other.

There was too much innocent blood on his hands, a lifetime of incompetence colored only by instances of suicidal bravery at all the wrong moments.

_"You're the guy who makes all the hard decisions, even if you have to make 'em alone."_

But for the dead, there is an abundance of time. He would appear to his friends, an unwelcome haunting in a double-breasted suit. His attempts to aid them were colorless and rote, hidden behind the words W&H bid him speak. He was a puppet in greyscale, insubstantial and, to those he had left behind, as relevant as the past in a world hurtling forward. Headed nowhere, in chaos like all the rest of it. Everything was in limbo. Everything had changed. The pens in his pocket signed documents in blood. 

He hated the feel of his own form, a clammy chill that followed him everywhere, the echoing hollowness of unfinished business. Bullying and bureaucracy, dark deeds done in neat office spaces under gently humming fluorescent lights. Summoning spells, copied in triplicate. He hated everything, but that single bright light, mocking his endless darkness. Night followed him everywhere, but as he fell into the monotony of the blind, the memory of her could still unman him. 

_Please, Wesley. Why can't I stay?_

Oh, yes. He knew her worth, now.


End file.
